Share “1 year after encampment began, Occupy in...”

1 year after encampment began, Occupy in disarray

NEW YORK (AP) — Occupy Wall Street began to disintegrate in rapid fashion last winter, when the weekly meetings in New York City devolved into a spectacle of fistfights and vicious arguments.

Police take Amanda Lodoza, an activist associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement, into custody during a march in New York, Sunday, Sept. 16, 2012. The Occupy Wall Street movement will mark its first anniversary on Monday. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Punches were thrown and objects were hurled at moderators' heads. Protesters accused each other of being patriarchal and racist and domineering. Nobody could agree on anything and nobody was in charge. The moderators went on strike and refused to show up, followed in quick succession by the people who kept meeting minutes. And then the meetings stopped altogether.

In the city where the movement was born, Occupy was falling apart.

"We weren't talking about real things at that point," says Pete Dutro, a tattoo artist who used to manage Occupy's finances but became disillusioned by the infighting and walked away months ago. "We were talking about each other."

The trouble with Occupy Wall Street, a year after it bloomed in a granite park in lower Manhattan and spread across the globe, is that nobody really knows what it is anymore. To say whether Occupy was a success or a failure depends on how you define it.

Occupy is a network. Occupy is a metaphor. Occupy is still alive. Occupy is dead. Occupy is the spirit of revolution, a lost cause, a dream deferred.

"I would say that Occupy today is a brand that represents movements for social and economic justice," says Jason Amadi, a 28-year-old protester who now lives in Philadelphia. "And that many people are using this brand for the quest of bettering this world."

On Monday, a couple hundred protesters converged near the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate Occupy's anniversary, marking the day they began camping out in Zuccotti Park.

About a dozen were arrested after sitting on the sidewalk, but there was no sign of a planned "people's wall" on the streets surrounding the stock exchange.

Instead, protesters held a small meeting where they talked about the ills of Wall Street and corporate greed.

Marches and rallies in more than 30 cities around the world will commemorate the day.

About 300 people observing the anniversary marched Saturday. At least a dozen were arrested, mostly on charges of disorderly conduct, police said.

But the movement is now a shadow of its mighty infancy, when a group of young people harnessed the power of a disillusioned nation and took to the streets chanting about corporate greed and inequality.

Back then it was a rallying cry, a force to be reckoned with. But as the encampments were broken up and protesters lost a gathering place, Occupy in turn lost its ability to organize.

The movement had grown too large too quickly. Without leaders or specific demands, what started as a protest against income inequality turned into an amorphous protest against everything wrong with the world.

"We were there to occupy Wall Street," Dutro says. "Not to talk about every social ill that we have."

The community that took shape in Zuccotti Park still exists, albeit in a far less cohesive form. Occupiers mostly keep in touch online through a smattering of websites and social networks. There are occasional conference calls and Occupy-affiliated newsletters. Meetings are generally only convened to organize around specific events, like the much-hyped May Day event that ultimately fizzled last spring.

The movement's remaining $85,000 in assets were frozen, though fundraising continues.

"The meetings kind of collapsed under their own weight," explains Marisa Holmes, a 26-year-old protester among the core organizers who helped Occupy rise up last fall. "They became overly concerned with financial decisions. They became bureaucratic."

In other words, they became a combustible microcosm of the society that Occupiers had decided to abandon — a new, equally flawed society with its own set of miniature hierarchies and toxic relationships. Even before the ouster at Zuccotti Park, the movement had been plagued with noise and sanitary problems, an inability to make decisions and a widening rift between the park's full-time residents and the movement's power players, most of whom no longer lived in the park.